No Arabic abstract
Gravitational wave observations of quasicircular compact binary mergers in principle provide an arbitrarily complex likelihood over eight independent intrinsic parameters: the masses and spins of the two merging objects. In this work, we demonstrate by example that a simple normal approximation over fewer (usually, three) effective dimensions provides a very accurate representation of the likelihood, and allows us to replicate the eight-dimensional posterior over the mass and spin degrees of freedom. Alongside this paper, we provide the parameters for multivariate normal fits for each event published in GWTC-1 and GWTC-2, using the posterior samples from the catalog for each associated release. These normal approximations provide a highly efficient way to characterize gravitational wave observations when combining large numbers of events.
As catalogs of gravitational-wave transients grow, new records are set for the most extreme systems observed to date. The most massive observed black holes probe the physics of pair instability supernovae while providing clues about the environments in which binary black hole systems are assembled. The least massive black holes, meanwhile, allow us to investigate the purported neutron star-black hole mass gap, and binaries with unusually asymmetric mass ratios or large spins inform our understanding of binary and stellar evolution. Existing outlier tests generally implement leave-one-out analyses, but these do not account for the fact that the event being left out was by definition an extreme member of the population. This results in a bias in the evaluation of outliers. We correct for this bias by introducing a coarse-graining framework to investigate whether these extremal events are true outliers or whether they are consistent with the rest of the observed population. Our method enables us to study extremal events while testing for population model misspecification. We show that this ameliorates biases present in the leave-one-out analyses commonly used within the gravitational-wave community. Applying our method to results from the second LIGO--Virgo transient catalog, we find qualitative agreement with the conclusions of Abbott et al, ApJL 913 L7 (2021). GW190814 is an outlier because of its small secondary mass. We find that neither GW190412 nor GW190521 are outliers.
The interaction, in the long--wavelength approximation, of normal and superconducting electromagnetic circuits with gravitational waves is investigated. We show that such interaction takes place by modifying the physical parameters R, L, C of the electromagnetic devices. Exploiting this peculiarity of the gravitational field we find that a circuit with two plane and statically charged condensers set at right angles can be of interest as a detector of periodic gravitational waves.
Full, non-linear general relativity predicts a memory effect for gravitational waves. For compact binary coalescence, the total gravitational memory serves as an inferred observable, conceptually on the same footing as the mass and the spin of the final black hole. Given candidate waveforms for any LIGO event, then, one can calculate the posterior probability distribution functions for the total gravitational memory, and use them to compare and contrast the waveforms. In this paper we present these posterior distributions for the binary black hole merger events reported in the first Gravitational Wave Transient Catalog (GWTC-1), using the Phenomenological and Effective-One-Body waveforms. On the whole, the two sets of posterior distributions agree with each other quite well though we find larger discrepancies for the $ell=2, m=1$ mode of the memory. This signals a possible source of systematic errors that was not captured by the posterior distributions of other inferred observables. Thus, the posterior distributions of various angular modes of total memory can serve as diagnostic tools to further improve the waveforms. Analyses such as this would be valuable especially for future events as the sensitivity of ground based detectors improves, and for LISA which could measure the total gravitational memory directly.
This work describes the operation of a High Frequency Gravitational Wave detector based on a cryogenic Bulk Acoustic Wave (BAW) cavity and reports observation of rare events during 153 days of operation over two seperate experimental runs (Run 1 and Run 2). In both Run 1 and Run 2 two modes were simultaneously monitored. Across both runs, the 3rd overtone of the fast shear mode (3B) operating at 5.506 MHz was monitored, while in Run 1 the second mode was chosen to be the 5th OT of the slow shear mode (5C) operating at 8.392 MHz. However, in Run 2 the second mode was selected to be closer in frequency to the first mode, and chosen to be the 3rd overtone of the slow shear mode (3C) operating at 4.993 MHz. Two strong events were observed as transients responding to energy deposition within acoustic modes of the cavity. The first event occurred during Run 1 on the 12/05/2019 (UTC), and was observed in the 5.506 MHz mode, while the second mode at 8.392 MHz observed no event. During Run 2, a second event occurred on the 27/11/2019(UTC) and was observed by both modes. Timing of the events were checked against available environmental observations as well as data from other detectors. Various possibilities explaining the origins of the events are discussed.
Gravitational waves, like light, can be gravitationally lensed by massive astrophysical objects such as galaxies and galaxy clusters. Strong gravitational-wave lensing, forecasted at a reasonable rate in ground-based gravitational-wave detectors such as Advanced LIGO, Advanced Virgo, and KAGRA, produces multiple images separated in time by minutes to months. These images appear as repeated events in the detectors: gravitational-wave pairs, triplets, or quadruplets with identical frequency evolution originating from the same sky location. To search for these images, we need to, in principle, analyze all viable combinations of individual events present in the gravitational-wave catalogs. An increasingly pressing problem is that the number of candidate pairs that we need to analyse grows rapidly with the increasing number of single-event detections. At design sensitivity, one may have as many as $mathcal O(10^5)$ event pairs to consider. To meet the ever-increasing computational requirements, we develop a fast and precise Bayesian methodology to analyse strongly lensed event pairs, enabling future searches. The methodology works by replacing the prior used in the analysis of one strongly lensed gravitational-wave image by the posterior of another image; the computation is then further sped up by a pre-computed lookup table. We demonstrate how the methodology can be applied to any number of lensed images, enabling fast studies of strongly lensed quadruplets.